Afghanistan III: American boots on the ground

By Dr. Sara Hart ,

Published May 4, 2026 at 10:00 AM PDT

Standing by on a hill top, Soldiers with the 101st Division Special Troops Battalion, 101st Airborne Division watch as two Chinook helicopters fly in to take them back to Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan Nov. 4, 2008. The Soldiers searched a small village in the valley below for IED making materials and facilities. (Photo by Spc. Mary L. Gonzalez, CJTF-101 Public Affairs)

America's engagement is yet another chapter in Afghanistan's long history.

Welcome back to SNAFUBAR. For today's episode, we’re wrapping up our three part series on Afghanistan and the United States’ involvement and relationship with the country. We’ll be discussing some of the history from the post Cold War era to today, including U.S. military involvement and the subsequent War on Terror. We’ll also discuss the continuing dynamics between the two countries, and the most recent withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2021.

SNAFUBAR is hosted by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Sara Hart⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, who teaches Religious Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt, and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jeff Crane ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠who is an Environmental Historian and Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cal Poly Humboldt.

Show Notes:

Research and writing for the show is done by Liam Salcuni and Roman Sotomayor

SNAFUBAR is produced by Abigail Smithson and brought to you by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cal Poly Humboldt.

Transcript:

[Music]

>> Dwight Eisenhower (Archival Audio): You are about to embark upon the great crusade.

>>JFK (Archival Audio): The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it.

>> Douglas MacArthur (Archival Audio): Only the dead have seen the end of war.

>> Dwight Eisenhower (Archival Audio): We will accept nothing less than full victory.

[Music]

>> Sara Hart: You're listening to SNAFUBAR, at Cal Poly Humboldt. Okay. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the SNAFUBAR, a show about American military history, and American military snafus, about the way that the nation's vaunted ideals and its deeply ingrained militarism have gone toe to toe. I'm Sarah Hart. I teach classes on America and its myths here at Cal Poly Humboldt and I work with the local veteran community on projects and programs in support of veteran’s reintegration into civilian life and in support of their continued service.

>>Jeff Crane: And I'm Jeff Crane, the dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences here at Cal Poly Humboldt. I'm a historian and a peacetime veteran who was raised in a culture of American exceptionalism. I worked in psychological operations during the 1980s wind-down of the Cold War, and I've spent my academic career concentrating on environmental, social histories and a lot of that related to military history.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, and Jeff, this is your time. We're in it today. We're going to start today's episode with that 1980s wind down that you spent your military years in the thick of, and with the 1990s euphoria that followed.

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, so it's going to be hard not to tell too many stories, but a 1990s euphoria. I remember fellow students traveling to Berlin to celebrate the tearing down of the wall. I remember how the Evergreen campus was alive and partying all night long when Clinton was elected, because, you know, everything was going to change. Uh, NAFTA was right around the corner with him. It was like a decade teetering on a peak or maybe on a razor's edge. We saw climate change. We didn't understand the depth or reach of it yet. Um, there had been a solution to the hole in the ozone layer, which actually happened and worked. That was nice. And of course, for me, the creation of The Simpsons is a great big part of the 1990s. Internet was a technology that at least some of us struggled to understand and implement, um, and seemed to be full of a lot of potential. We didn't really see the kind of what we might call the daily dystopia, pocket consumerism and doomscrolling on our smartphones brings some of us now. Um, so do I sound ancient when I say that? Can you hear my knees creaking when I talk about smartphones are destroying America. And the Cold War was over. We could turn back the countdown clock. Breathe deeply for a while at last. And oh, you know what? We'd won against communism as we thought about it. And the U.S. was running a budget surplus. Nothing but smooth sailing and clear skies in a tailwind.

>>Sara Hart: That’s right. Easy.

>>Jeff Crane: All good in the hood.

>>Sara Hart: Nothing but happy days. Um, I mean, in a budget surplus, younger listeners, I don't know if you can imagine this. It was- we had a budget surplus.

>>Jeff Crane: And now the mood turns because do not get started on the deficit, the debt, all of that. But yeah, that was a time when we still had manufacturing like Oshkosh shirts were actually made in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. So yeah, it was great. Nothing to do but ride the curl, right?

>>Sara Hart: Yeah. Shred the gnar.

>>Jeff Crane: And you say that like I know what that means.

>>Sara Hart: Ride the curl, shred the gnar. Surfing reference, Jeff.

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, yeah, I got that far.

>>Sara Hart: Now we're in the 90s and the Cold War is over. But that doesn't mean the world cascades into peace everywhere. The 90s weren't euphoric for everyone, it turns out. We've seen this. We'll see more of it today. This is the third episode

>>Jeff Crane: Sorry. There are other people in the world besides Americans?

>>Sara Hart: It turns out, every once in a while, we draw back the curtain like, um, turn off the screens, people, for just a second. Yeah, we'll see some of them today. This is the third episode in our three part series on Afghanistan. We opened this series, remember, with a look at Afghanistan's history from its importance in the Silk Road era to its modern emergence as a nation state.

>>Jeff Crane: Because we love history and context.

>>Sara Hart: We do a little bit, you know, this is what we're here for. We looked at the great game, first between Great Britain and Russia and then between America and Russia. And remember that for both Great Britain and later for America, Afghanistan was the game board in that metaphor. Um, both the region and the people of of Afghanistan were used by the UK and then by the U.S. to limit Russian expansion and influence, to serve as a buffer against the Russians. That episode, we called “America's Great Game.”

>>Jeff Crane: And “used” is absolutely the correct verb here, which is not us interpreting. We have more than enough evidence to make that case. So, um, in episode two, in the series “The Path of Jihad,” we talked about how America funded the mujahideen, Islamic holy warriors during the 1980s Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. We did so in order to weaken the USSR, America's Cold War nemesis. We talked about the 1976 church report and how it led to policies and laws limiting the power of American intelligence agencies, especially the CIA. And we talked about Operation Cyclone, which ran from 1979 through 1992 and cost well over $20 billion in 70s, 90s dollars, which is not much.

>>Sara Hart: Somewhere around $60 billion today, huh?

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, that's Operation Cyclone. Besides being the CIA's most expensive covert operation ever, and a shifty expedient for getting around new and strengthened operational limits, Operation Cyclone explicitly nurtured the radical Islamism that for 21st century America, is linked inextricably, with terrorism. The CIA joined forces with Pakistan's ISI to fund the most militant in the most ideologically extreme mujahideen fighters they could find. They did this on purpose. Those were the guys they wanted. And finally, we talked about the violent chaos that filled, the power vacuum that was left by the 1989 Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, as well as our stepping away from Afghanistan.

>>Sara Hart: It was a lot. And today, we'll finish this Afghanistan series, folks, with an episode that we're calling, “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” Here, we'll talk about the lead up to the 21st century, those final fraught years of the 1900s. And during this time, and looking back, this is easy to see, America catalyzed a global jihadist movement by funding and supporting the Mujahideen. We just did. To fight in a proxy war against the Soviets and maybe defeat them. Sort of. And so by default, those-

>>Jeff Crane: They're not Soviets anymore. But Russia's back.

>>Sara Hart: They’re back! Here come the Russians. And so by default, those mujahideen were fighting on the side of America. I mean, that's how that worked out. We'll talk about the lead up to and the aftermath of the September 11th, 2001 terror attacks.

>>Jeff Crane: Wait, is there a relationship?

>>Sara Hart: Uh, and we'll look at that aftermath.

>>Jeff Crane: Or fallout.

>>Sara Hart: We'll look at what happened after 9/11 in American foreign and domestic policy, and how those choices and events have shaped both American and global realities.

>>Jeff Crane: And while we're a history show, not a current events show. We'll try to end today with some consideration of where this leaves us today, won't we?

>>Sara Hart: We’ll try. You know we will. But it is unsteady ground we're on here in the present. So, you know, listeners, don't expect any easy answers.

[Music]

>>Jeff Crane: Hello, listeners, and welcome back to the SNAFUBAR. I'm Jeff Crane and I'm here with Sarah Hart. You're joining us for the third and final episode in our series on Afghanistan. And today's show, we'll be looking at some post-Cold War history leading up to and then following the September 11th attacks on America. Well, we just, we believe in keeping it light on the show.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, yeah. Nothing but the fun stuff.

>>Jeff Crane: So, when we left off Sarah, the Russians, the Americans had pulled out of Afghanistan, leaving behind a lot: tons of weapons and a huge power vacuum with different groups vying for control and power in that country. That's about right.

>>Sara Hart: That's right. And as this violent chaos is seething all over the Afghanistan countryside, the Russians and the Americans are coming together in the interest of global peace and security. This is a moment of real international optimism of Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika and those words. Um, you know, everyone alive in the 90s sort of remembers these words, but they mean openness, transparency. And then perestroika means something like reform or restructuring.

>>Jeff Crane: Maybe we need our own glasnost.

>>Sara Hart: You know, we could use some glasnost, right? America's glasnost. It's a very positive vibe going on in the 90s. The Cold War is over.

>>Jeff Crane: Woohoo!

>>Sara Hart: I know, everybody's partying and the Soviets left Afghanistan in February 1989. And then just a few months later, it's November 1989. The Berlin Wall comes down. And this really was a moment of international celebration and of hope. That decades-long fever dream of Cold War nuclear threat was finally coming to an end.

>>Jeff Crane: It's hard to overestimate the impact of this moment. 350,000 people showed up to see the wall come down in person. 500 million people watched live on TV. This is a huge deal for people who don't know, the Berlin Wall basically divided East and Western Berlin, and Eastern Berlin was part of East Germany. It was part of the-- It was a communist state, right. So just to keep it simple here. And so Germany unifies.

>>Sara Hart: 500 million people watching live on TV. That's almost four times the number of people who watched the Super Bowl this year, just for some frame of reference.

>>Jeff Crane: Go Seahawks.

>>Sara Hart: Go Seahawks. I don't know what it would take to get that many people paying attention to anything today. You know, there was at this time, a really widespread sense that the whole world would change, that it was changing. The Cold War was over. The Doomsday Clock gave us four more minutes right away in 1989, and in 1991, it was moved all the way back to 17 minutes before midnight.

>>Jeff Crane: So, Afghanistan, how did they experience this euphoria?

>>Sara Hart: So, remember earlier in this series when we looked at that illustrative metonymic moment in 1990, which we've returned to a few moments a few times, but it really does just stand out. When Soviet President Gorbachev and U.S. Secretary of State James Baker sat down for some reflective and self-congratulatory peacemaking, they looked back at the Soviets' failed occupation of Afghanistan. They looked back at the Soviet retreat and at America's successful efforts to embroil the Soviets in a Vietnam-level quagmire there. They celebrated the ability of both of their nations to shake hands and move forward away from this rugged, war-torn landscape and into the future of neoliberal global market capitalism. Yeah, it's bright, it's shiny. It's new. And Afghanistan ripped apart by civil wars and suffering extreme impoverishment.

>>Jeff Crane: We’ll, let them boil in their own juices, quote unquote. That's what they said. And that was that we, the United States, walked away. The Soviet Union walked away. This is an example of the deep cynicism of American foreign policy. For over a decade, U.S. gamemanship in Afghanistan had worked to undermine the USSR by supporting the mujahideen and did it well. The USSR was now dissolving and was no longer a threat. We simply could not care a single bit about the health of Afghanistan society and how they would transition after such a difficult, long and brutal war. But the mujahideen that America helped create and strengthen, empower, embolden, enlarge, expand, these guys, they were done not by a long shot, by supporting those Mujahadeen America set the stage for the global jihad that would define, and is still helping define geopolitics in the early 21st century. Am I overstating here?

>>Sara Hart: No, no, I think you're right. You're right there. Um, and we can look back now, and we can see that the entry into the 21st century isn't marked by party like it's 1999. It's not marked by Y2K. It really is marked by 9/11.

>>Jeff Crane: I guess this is where I have to lower the tone a little bit.

>>Sara Hart: This is where we turn very serious for a second. And America did. And you know, on the morning of September 11th, 2001, ten men hijacked two planes with 147 passengers and crew members on board and flew them into New York's World Trade Center. Five men flew another hijacked plane into the Pentagon building, with 59 passengers and crew members on board, and four men crash landed a fourth plane into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Because they were overtaken by some of the 40 passengers and crew on board who prevented them from crashing into either the white House or the Capitol building as they had planned.

>>Jeff Crane: The number of fatalities on the ground was far higher. In addition to the 246 people killed on the planes, 2977 people were killed when the planes hit their targets. 9/11 was an unconscionable and indefensible attack on a civilian population. Nothing worth saying here diminishes that fact. For most Americans, it felt like it came out of nowhere. Thousands died that day. Tens of thousands later developed a whole range of cancers and other health ailments related directly to debris inhalation. The American sense of physical safety from the Marshall attack, right, the oceans protecting us from other countries that have been so strong for so long, giving us confidence and going to war was shattered that Tuesday morning. Americans were reeling.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, the physical safety of the nation had been breached. And the effects of that on Americans in terms of policy, practice, culture, psychology, those effects were, I think, really inestimable. It led to decades of aggressive militarism, and it helped to inform the fury that America expressed in response to the attacks. And that response really would be swift.

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. We have to remember that America, you know, our CIA, the government, had already known about Osama bin Laden for some time. He'd been on the radar. As CIA Director George Tenet said, the system had been blinking red, and for quite a while.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, and we've seen him already in earlier episodes. Bin Laden had been fighting in Afghanistan for years against the Soviets. In reporting on his May 1998 interview with Bin Laden, ABC journalist John Miller places bin Laden in Afghanistan almost immediately following the Soviet invasion. Miller writes, “On December 25th, 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Bin Laden, then 22, left for the fighting immediately. When he arrived, he wasted no time spending his money. He financed the recruitment, transportation and arming of thousands of Palestinians, Tunisians, Somalians, Egyptians, Saudis and Pakistanis to fight the Russians.”

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. And so this is just six months after the earliest meetings of Operation Cyclone starta under Jimmy, President Jimmy Carter. Those start in May 1979. We talked about this a good deal in episode two, the last episode. The CIA is just really escalating the funding of the mujahideen. And that's when bin Laden shows up on the scene, ready to bankroll an army. And he really wants to fight the Soviets. And he does, but he comes from a deep position of faith. I mean, it's so deep that when he was a kid, other kids teased him about it.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah. This is a passionately faithful person. He's motivated. He's motivated by deep, uh, deep faith. And he has money. He's independently wealthy. His father owns the Saudi bin Laden group, the most successful and the most powerful construction company in Saudi Arabia. And he's charismatic, which makes him powerful. He's really well positioned. So that's kind of what we want to hit home. He's able to fundraise. He's able to unify people. From the end of 1979 through the mid 1980s, some sources have him on the front lines, frantically building roads and trenches and fighting off the Russians. Others having farther from the action, networking and organizing and providing a kind of rear echelon support. Most everyone agrees that by 1986, he's actively fighting, leading troops into battles, and in 1988 he organizes a group that he calls Al-Qaeda, or “the base,” to bring money and mujahideen fighters into Afghanistan.

>>Jeff Crane: And it worked, right? It worked for more than its own early aims.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah it did. Ten years in, the mission had expanded for bin Laden, well beyond Afghanistan. When the Mujahideen drove the Soviets out in 1989, it was less a victory for bin Laden and more a stage on the way to victory. Like one step, he had expanded his goal, his sense of possible reach. John Miller reports that, “the war changed bin Laden” and get ready for this. “Bin Laden told Miller in 1998 that the Soviet retreat, quote, cleared from Muslim minds the myth of superpowers.”

>>Jeff Crane: That's a pretty powerful quote.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, bin Laden thought if the Soviets could fall, then why not the Americans? The Soviets were gone, but the Americans were visible not just in the Middle East, but also in Northern Africa and worldwide, through the far flung global reach of their military bases and through the free market capitalism that such bases supported.

>>Jeff Crane: I can't help but think about how much this myth of superpowers has really shaped our understanding of geopolitics and of conflict.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, I mean, there are definitely ways in which we still believe it and we act according to it. This myth of like, there is such a thing of superpowers.

>>Jeff Crane: Particularly for citizens of those superpowers?

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, it works best for us. You know, following, uh, like, I think we imagine a lot of our global geopolitical reality to take place and be governed through the agency of a very small number of actors. And those actors I think we can think of as superpowers. So, I mean, that is the model that we've been using. And that's sort of some of bin Laden here says like, look, we don't we don't buy it anymore. The Soviets fell. Um, so following the first Gulf War in 1991, the American military did not leave the region. They built more bases, according to David Vine, who wrote Base Nation a really great study. Um, the U.S. had a total of 411 bases, including small bases or lily pads, outside the U.S. in 1990.

>>Jeff Crane: I'm gonna do that thing that apparently only I do, because you don't seem to do it to me much. I'm giving you a green light to interrupt you, but, uh, we were stationed at Sigonella in Sicily. We lived, like, 30 miles from the base. Um, my dad was a tech rep for Grumman Aerospace and, um, arrows, Grumman aerospace, whatever. Worked on planes. There were people that lived on base or right across from base that bragged about never going anywhere.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah. Why would you have to? It's a self-contained mini-America

>>Jeff Crane: You're living in frigging Italy!

>>Sara Hart: I mean, since 90. Okay. So this I mean, this is true that the self-contained nature of American base culture is a thing. And you can leave because you're American and you have a passport, and most often you can get off and go somewhere else. But a lot of folks don't.

>>Jeff Crane: American dollars was very strong in Italy at that time.

>>Sara Hart: It's convenient. Also, the American dollar. How's it doing these days? Uh, okay. Since 1990, an additional 173 have been opened. So now we're counting bases. This is David Vine, counting bases. And this number. Um, it only includes bases that he was able to obtain an opening date for. Um, his current conservative estimate as of some years back, 2021-that's the most recent count-is 750 bases across 80 foreign countries and territories.

>>Jeff Crane: And there's probably some he couldn't find, some of them pretty secretive.

>>Sara Hart: Oh, he makes a point of this. There's plenty he can't find. There's plenty he can find, but they don't have- they're not officially opened at any point. They don't count on the list.

>>Jeff Crane: So these are like little America's, uh, in fact, that's a phrase that used to be used anyways. So there's a PX, uh, the commissary, bowling alleys, restaurants, Baskin-Robbins, Burger King…

>>Sara Hart: All the comforts of home.

>>Jeff Crane: So many Americans don't ever leave these bases. But there is a distinct and direct impact on local cultures beyond the military. One analogy might be roads to healthy ecosystems. Fragments of environment fragments, introduces new and invasive elements, which are sometimes threatening to the more conservative or traditional local communities. The U.S. has had a military presence in Saudi Arabia since 1945, when the Dhahran Airfield was a key conduit for World War II logistics. It's now transitioned to full Saudi control, and it's called the King Abdulaziz Air Base. But we've had this presence when we expanded it, and this presence increased dramatically over the course of the 90s. And this base structure had a huge impact on local communities in ways that Americans themselves don't often think about. And there's a reason for this. Military historian Chalmers Johnson makes this point in his book Nemesis, when he states directly and flatly that, “Americans cannot truly appreciate the impact of our bases elsewhere because there are no foreign military bases within the United States.” And this is a useful what if moment. What if China or Saudi Arabia or Germany or Venezuela had an active military base in Texas and North Dakota and Florida and California, and their soldiers were coming into our communities, and they were bringing their culture directly into contact with ours, right? How would we respond to it? And really, if you're thinking, well, that's ridiculous, that's the point. The inconceivability of this, its sheer absurdity as a possibility, points to a fundamental difference between American self-perception and the way everyone else in the world perceives us.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah. And we really do think of ourselves differently. I can't imagine a foreign military based on the street from my house. I just can't. And bin Laden is locked in on this, and he's organizing, like, he sort of feels the same way about Saudi Arabia, believe it or not, and at this point, Afghanistan. And the CIA are on to him, and they're not clear on the details, but they do recognize that he is a central figure with influence. In January 1996, the CIA opened the bin Laden issue station to try to pick up leads and piece together the intelligence. In August 1996, a declaration of war was issued with Osama bin Laden's name on it. It was a declaration as it was, quote, this is what is called a declaration of jihad against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy Mosques. That's Saudi Arabia, and it charged mujahedeen everywhere to, quote, expel the heretics from the Arabian Peninsula. That is an escalation. Um, expelling the heretics is largely pointed at America, but also the larger, broader Western world. Um, in February 1998, Osama bin Laden invited the press to his camp at Khost in eastern Afghanistan to announce the International Islamic Front for jihad against Jews and Crusaders. That's what he called it.

>>Jeff Crane: Thinking of Pope Urban II. I think it was 1085 when he launched the Crusades. Something like that. Rolling out with that history knowledge, yo.

>>Sara Hart: Bring in the Crusades back, um, and to declare jihad on Americans everywhere. This is what bin Laden does, military and civilian. It was an anti-American, and anti-Semitic proclamation. There's just no question about that. And the camp at Khost, where he announced it, was a camp that the CIA had built for him.

>>Jeff Crane: What was that? Can you say that one more time?

>>Sara Hart: The camp where from which he announced his jihad against, quote, Jews and crusaders and Americans everywhere, was a camp that the CIA had built for him when anti-Soviet jihad was the name of the game in American military strategy. Of course in February of 1993 we have the first bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City, in an attack also linked to al-Qaeda, killing six people and injuring over 1000. And in October of 2000, al-Qaeda bombed the USS Cole, docked off of the coast of Yemen, killing 17 sailors, and injuring 40 crew members. So there was a lot going on during this time that led up to the attacks on September 11.

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. So it feels like maybe somebody has to make a SNAFUBAR comment here.

>>Sara Hart: Whoa, man.

>>Jeff Crane: Again, you can be a little outraged that our… armchair, or what is it called what? Monday quarterbacking is that the term? Where we were like, woah… But this is what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to look at these historical moments, we're supposed to analyze them and hopefully learn from history, or at least pretend that we try. Bin Laden took credit for the August 1998 East African embassy bombings. He had intelligence agencies from around the world looking for him. In August 1998, the U.S. Navy fired cruise missiles from ships in the Arabian Sea targeting bin Laden at the Khost camp. He escaped to Pakistan. On June 7th, 1999, he's placed on the FBI's Most Wanted list. In October 1999, the U.N. Security Council Resolution 1267 linked the Taliban officially with al Qaeda and imposing sanctions on both together. It's clear now to the first world powers that the mujahideen groups that developed near the Pakistan border and the context of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and in the subsequent civil wars, its clear that these groups were organized and that Osama bin Laden is a leader. And the Western world, particularly the United States, is a target.

>>Jeff Crane: Welcome back listeners. I'm Jeff Crane. I'm here with Sarah Hart. You’re joining us here in the SNAFUBAR. We're in our third and final episode in a series on Afghanistan. We've been talking about the post-Cold War events that were precursors to the 9/11 attacks. Osama bin Laden called for a global jihad. The Western powers were all looking for him. America had put him on the FBI's most wanted list, and in September 2001, America was the target of a series of coordinated attacks. We'll spend the rest of our time here today with what happened afterwards.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, within the within days of the attacks. President Bush set the stage for an extraordinarily ambitious response. On the afternoon of September 16th, he speaks from the South Lawn of the White House, assuring Americans, quote, my administration has a job to do, and we're going to do it. We will rid the world of evil doers.

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. Well, I am as impressed as anyone by somebody who has big dreams, but that's a lot. We might just know quickly that this is not consistent with the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine articulated by Reagan. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger in 1984. This doctrine defined the conditions required for using American military force in an attempt to set reasonable limits. There had to be a vital national interest. The military had to go all in to win. It had to have clearly defined objectives, had to regularly assess if force was still necessary. It had to have a reasonable assurance that the public would be supportive. And maybe the president should get intelligence briefings. And it had to be done only as a last resort. Everybody got behind the Weinberger Doctrine in answer to the sharpest failures of the Vietnam War. Our own quagmire. Right?

>>Sara Hart: Right. And this looks like an effort to actually learn from history. I mean, that's good, right?

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, it is if it sticks. And Colin Powell, who was Secretary of State under Bush in September 2001 picked up the Weinberger Doctrine when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs under President Bush Sr. in the lead up to the first Gulf War in 1990. Powell, who was a veteran of Vietnam, served there. But he emphasized two things. If you're going to go to war, you have to be willing to use overwhelming force. we don't need that, right? Bring overwhelming force. And if you're going to go to war, you have to have a clear end and a clear exit strategy. So I'm not sure what it looks like to say you're going to rid the world of evildoers. I simply can't imagine that. It is a fantastical notion. We know that now, of course, in terms of these actions in Afghanistan and later Iraq. But how do you even make that list? Who is on it?

>>Sara Hart: I mean, it is an impossible task, which is just the sort of thing that the Weinberger Powell Doctrine was written to avoid: a never ending task or war. Bad for the country, bad for the world, but great for the defense industry. And this is what two days later, President Bush would commit the nation to. On September 18th, 2001, Bush signed a joint resolution, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF. It is broad, it is unending, and it is notably not a declaration of war.

>>Jeff Crane: And I'm going to ask the listeners, think about it. When was the last declaration of war? Give it a second. Unless you're amazingly well versed, you will not know the answer to this. Article one, section eight of the Constitution grants Congress, let me say it again, Congress the power to declare war, but we don't use it anymore. In fact, the last time Congress declared war was on June 4th, 1942, against Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, some people typically will say Germany or Japan, right, if they have some notion of what we've done with our war since World War Two. And we did that because they were allies of Nazi Germany.

>>Sara Hart: The thing about declarations is that when you make them, you know, you're at war, like you're really at war. We're in a world now where none of the constant military action we engage in is defined as war. It's all just military force or operations other than combat or really, you know, targeted operations. It's not war. There's just like, there's this vibe of, like, nothing to see here, folks.

>>Jeff Crane: But, the messaging from the white House and other places, and society was about returning to normalcy immediately. Right? We have to have the World Series, it's critical. And consumption as a way to demonstrate we have not been defeated. Think about that for a second. And this speaks to the power of neoliberal capitalism as a defining feature of American society. The Onion, one of my favorite things to read, had a great article in November 2001. And understand, folks, if you didn't live in this era, it was weird how much we were being told the way to respond to this was to go shopping, to go to the mall, to return to normalcy. It was a very weird moment in American history. So the title of the article was, quote, if I don't get my medium rare steak with roasted vegetables in the next ten minutes, the terrorists have already won, unquote. And so it's no wonder the American public takes militarism for granted. What are they supposed to think? What are we supposed to think about what's happening in the world's war zones? These are all somebody else's wars, right? Because we're fighting them all the other places fought by other people. Generally, the Americans that fight are from lower economic strata. Lots of Southerners, lots of rural folks.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, that's who's doing the fighting on behalf of America. And in 2001, Congress isn't declaring war officially, but the president is declaring war in a different way. In his address to Congress and the American people on September 20th, 2001, President Bush says that all evidence points to al Qaeda and that al Qaeda is in Afghanistan and connected to the Taliban. He tells Americans that, quote, our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end, he goes on to say, until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated. He says that, quote, Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign.

>>Jeff Crane: And what he needs to do when he makes a speech like that is then say, this is what Americans need to do to support it. Here are the sacrifices you need to make. Instead of cutting taxes, you should increase taxes.

>>Sara Hart: You're going to have to pay for this.

>>Jeff Crane: And there are those of us who believe that a lot of this provided cover for the massive tax cuts passed by the Bush administration. Let me be clear, for me. And then I'm going to hand it off to Sarah. Al-Qaeda, absolutely, 100% had to be targeted, had to be removed. Its the word I'll use because I don't want to get into, you know, like Pete Hegsethian macho language here. But there had to be a response to what happened on 9/11. No question. And that's not what we're talking about here, Sarah.

>>Sara Hart: I, I would agree. I mean, in a world where war exists and this is a legit target and should be, um, yeah. I mean, removal will go soft on that. I think just, I think, I think a full throated response to al-Qaeda was absolutely appropriate. This was an enemy combatant group that had targeted America. They should be, you know, blown off the face of the planet for sure. I'm going to go that far. We're not arguing that. Like, that's not the point here is not that America didn't have cause to react militarily to an attack on its own soil.

>>Jeff Crane: Right. We did. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, later on this would shift from al-Qaeda to Taliban. And that's where a lot of the mistakes happened in Afghanistan, for example. So he's rolled out a fantastical list of things that we're going to do, which are in no way accomplishable. It reminds me of my goal list. I make these insane goal lists I cannot possibly achieve. But they stand in direct contradiction to the Weinberger Powell Doctrine. So we know where we're going to throw the first punch. But by the rhetoric of President Bush the enemie’s everywhere. And there's evil doers everywhere. And we're going to war. But not really. Not in a constitutional legal sense. So we're not asking people to step up and support the war effort. And I'm doubling down on this. You may have noticed I'm drifting away from the script because and not doing so and not recognizing the militarism of American society. We fail to prepare for and support these veterans when they come home.

>>Sara Hart: We do.

>>Jeff Crane: This is a big thing for you and I.

>>Sara Hart: We do. We absolutely do. This is an ignored population. This is the 1% of America that serves, that subsidizes the 1% of billionaires who run the country for the 99% of us who gleefully walk through our sale aisles in the dollar bins. While we saddle the future generations with uncountable, just immeasurable debt

>>Jeff Crane: Trauma and debt.

>>Sara Hart: Trauma and debt and trauma and debt. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay, so, yeah, we're a little critical here. Just a little bit. This is a war that will never end. The enemy is everywhere. It's set up to never end. There is no recognition of the limits of the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine.The president tells us who's at war. This is Bush speaking. Quote, freedom and fear are at war. End quote. He says that however long it takes, quote, the outcome is certain because God is not neutral between them.

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. And, you know, crusader rhetoric always goes down really well. And it’s a great premise for warfare,

>>Sara Hart: Especially in the Muslim Middle East.

>>Jeff Crane: Well Christians never lost any wars in the Middle East.

>>Sara Hart: No generational trauma around that. Okay. And so it begins on October 7th, 2001, less than a month since it had been attacked, America launched Operation Enduring Freedom. It was originally called Operation Infinite Justice, but that name was, quote, scratched, as The New York Times Elizabeth Becker wrote at the time, quote, for upsetting Islamic sensibilities. Infinite Justice, you see, is the purview of God and God alone and not America,

>>Jeff Crane: Says you, Dr. Hart, you Left-Wing Bolsheviki. And Bush is trying clumsily for sure not to upset Islamic sensibilities. Right? And he does. Let's give him some credit in places where he tries to address that Americans that are from the Middle East that are Muslim are not enemies. He does do that, but Americans know that it will depend on Muslim allies in the region. So Bush wants to be careful about separating radical, extremist jihadist terrorists from Muslims in general. In his speech to the UN General Assembly on November 10th, 2001, about a month after Operation Enduring Freedom started, Bush tells the world, quote, my country grieves for all the suffering the Taliban have brought upon Afghanistan, including the terrible burden of war, unquote.

>>Sara Hart: All the suffering that the Taliban have brought upon Afghanistan.

>>Jeff Crane: He’s definitely counting on the lack of historical understanding in our society there. And what's missing from that public grieving is any historical context, any recognition of America's role in supporting and encouraging and building the Taliban, al Qaeda and setting up the conditions for their organization. No mention of Operation Cyclone as if it's like it's as if it never happened right? Again, Americans being pristine of historical knowledge. It’s easy to do this when you live in a historical society, or what American historian Richard Hofstadter referred to as anti-intellectual America.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah. You know, we do bring this up, really, again, not to let the Taliban off the hook or to forgive their actions or to suggest that what they're doing at this point is defensible. We don't think that's true. In his book “The New American Militarism,” Andrew Bacevich writes that, quote, the United States cannot be held culpable for the maladies that today find expression in violent Islamic radicalism. End quote. And we agree with that. That's clear to us. But Bacevich goes on, quote, neither can the United States absolve itself of any and all responsibility for the conditions that have exacerbated those maladies. End quote. And Operation Cyclone absolutely exacerbated those maladies. So the Taliban is scattered quickly at this point. Their organization collapses in December 2001. But al-Qaeda is still in the mountains and bin Laden hasn't been caught. In January 2002, Bush gives the state of the Union in which he introduces, “the axis of evil.” He names Iran, Iraq and North Korea. But he also makes clear the axis of evil is not limited to those three nations. Quote. States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil. It's states like them, and we're fighting in Afghanistan. So, you know, Afghanistan's like them.

>>Jeff Crane: So, you know, we did an episode on military lingo. What does he trigger by saying axis?

>>Sara Hart: Oh, well, I'm glad you ask. This is World War II, right? It was the axis versus the Allied. We know that the axis are the bad guys. Like, he knows this. We know this

>>Jeff Crane: And we don't, I mean, I think if you ask someone on the street to name the Axis forces from World War II who are countries they might not know, but it's so deeply embedded in our lizard brain. Yeah, right, that Japan, Italy, Germany, those were the axis allies in WW2

>>Sara Hart: And all three of those nations became nations in the same year

>>Jeff Crane: And it's a-oh wow, check you out with that deep level of jeopardy knowledge. Um, but what it does is it invokes, the way we see it, the goodness of our actions in World War II.

>>Sara Hart: Yes.

>>Jeff Crane: As part of what's happening now, it's also worth pointing out there's not a great deal of strategic planning for a long war in Afghanistan. It was never the intent. Great success early and then transitioning into a long, oorly managed war because of the lack of a strategic plan.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah. I mean, again, we're just we just can't help but think about the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine. Somebody should have pulled it out of the file cabinet. Okay, yeah but you're right. This is what we get with Operation Enduring Freedom. This is the long haul. This operation lasts from 2001, October 2001, through December 2014, or nearly 14 years. So by the time of this state of the Union in January 2002, bin Laden's taken credit for the 9/11 attacks, he's taunted and threatened America in videos released to television networks, and he's still on the run. Suicide bombings, roadside IEDs, all of this increases in 2006. American military presence peaked shortly after that. And listeners were sort of rolling through the early aughts here and doing their thinking.

>>Jeff Crane: We didn't even mention the bombings in London, for example.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah. There's so much. So we are going to fly through the early aughts. A team of Wall Street Journal reporters write that quote, in 2008, the U.S. had 187,900 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, the peak of the U.S. deployment, and 203,660 contractor personnel. End quote. After that, they report, quote, the ratio of contractors to troops went up, end quote. By the time Trump left office in 2021, after his first term, there were 2500 American troops in Afghanistan and 18,000 private military contractors. So the numbers are smaller, but the ratio is more extreme.

>>Jeff Crane: This is a show about American history primarily, and we're both American. And so that's where it focuses. But it isn't just American troops on the ground. It's important to remember that U.N. Security Council Resolution 1386 established the International Security Assistance Force, or for Abigail: ISAF, which included fighting forces from 42 countries, every NATO country. Every NATO country and a dozen non-NATO countries contributed to the effort. More than 40,000 Canadian troops deployed between 2001 and 2014. The British had a very strong presence as well, if I remember correctly. ISAF commanders rotated, came through and came from different nations. This is part of the substantial international outpouring of support that followed 9/11

>>Sara Hart: And 2009. We're in the Obama era now. Obama uses the same language as his predecessors did for justifying this battle, that quote, we did not ask for, end quote, as he prepares to send 30,000 more troops into it. But of course, he assures us that if U.S. security and freedom at home weren't at stake, he would, quote, gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow. That's President Obama, but supposedly it is at stake. Um, so once more into the breach.

>>Jeff Crane: Once more into the breach!

>>Sara Hart: Uh, okay. Let's not forget Obama's upwards of 563 drone strikes across Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia that are reported to have killed between 384 and 807 civilians, according to differing data reports. Um, but 563, if we take that as our high estimate, which is conservative, is ten times more than Bush authorized, drone strikes-wise. While, you know, we can talk about the, like, increased technology and, you know, the cost of drones went down and all this is true. But like Obama, President Obama is not substantially in any way different from President Bush in terms of his approach to Afghanistan.

>>Jeff Crane: So when it comes to critiquing the use of war and the rhetoric around war, we are nonpartisan in the SNAFUBAR

>>Sara Hart: Equal opportunity.

>>Jeff Crane: Equal opportunity critics.

>>Sara Hart: We’re concealing the fact that innocent civilians were often killed, or we just didn't know who was being killed. This is drones. Drones made Obama look bad. He needed to save face. He needed a win. He needed Operation Neptune Spear. In 2011, Navy Seal Team 6 under Operation Neptune spear tracked down and killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

>>Jeff Crane: And you know, now everyone knows Navy Seal Team 6, right? It’s a phrase that gets bandied about. Even our provost, our current provost, was talking about how great the leadership team is, the chairs that she works with, and she listed the faculty as like, that's like our Seal Team 6 of faculty.

>>Sara Hart: Um, just like academic administration people.

>>Jeff Crane: Sorry, I'm doing exactly that, which we critique in our military lingo episode. So that's a win. And this, again, this is not an episode that is supportive of bin Laden. It's one that's trying to help us understand how he was created and what he launched and how we responded to it. Right? We've already stated our position on Al-Qaeda, and not only did President Obama need a win, we also need to acknowledge and understand that there was an ongoing and active pursuit of bin Laden, and he did need to be eliminated. He was the architect of that brutal attack on 9/11. This is in the national interest. We do not have a problem with that.

>>Sara Hart: Okay. Operation Enduring Freedom ended on December 28th, 2014. American forces did not leave Afghanistan, though. Operation Freedom's Sentinel picked up on January 1st, 2015, and NATO started calling their presence the Resolute Support Mission.

>>Jeff Crane: With a name like that, you were simply saying, hey, Gods on top of Mount Olympus, will you please pay attention to our hubris and do something given our awkward history of hasty and not well planned exits from wars. Not necessarily a great name.

>>Sara Hart: No, I mean, resolute would prove to be an inaccurate term. It turns out U.S. troop deployment was decreased to about 10,000, and Freedom's Sentinel lasted until September 30th, 2021. It was considered a quote, train, advise, assist mission, and it was characterized by Taliban resurgence, more counter insurgencies, peace talks, attempts at peace talks. They don't really go anywhere

>>Jeff Crane: And neither do the Taliban. They're still there. In August 2021, their successes were pretty unbelievable. In mid-August 2021, they're tearing through the country, capturing provincial capitals, border crossings. The Afghan forces America was there to train, advise and assist were laying down their arms for the most part. They'd been at war for decades, and the American rebuilding counter-insurgency missions had clearly not panned out. And neither the Afghans are tired. Right? Um, so much did decades and decades of warfare. By late August, the Americans are in full retreat to the Hamid Karzai airport in Kabul. On August 26th, a suicide bomber kills 13 U.S. service members and nearly 200 Afghan civilians. Everyone's trying to get to the airport and trying to get out of Afghanistan in what was a very poorly organized effort under the Biden administration. It's really, uh, I have to say, again, in our nonpartisan approach, a shameful retreat from Afghanistan, the way it was managed. For that bombing. The Islamic State in Kherson claimed responsibility. The U.S. retaliates with airstrikes. The intel is bad. The strikes end up killing ten Afghan civilians, some of whom are children. So it's just all bad news at this point?

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, hundreds of thousands of people were flocking to the airport trying to escape. The U.S. and coalition partners airlifted over 123,000 of them, which is a lot and really fast.

>>Jeff Crane: But this is something that could have been happening for weeks. It could have.

>>Sara Hart: It could have. Yeah. They did a lot. They did it really fast. They did it with what appeared to the outside observer as almost no planning.

>>Jeff Crane: But there were people commandeering planes, bringing them in to rescue people they knew. Right? It was just a mess.

>>Sara Hart: And hundreds of thousands remained, many of whom had worked directly with American forces for years as interpreters and brothers and sisters in arms, and who were therefore marked for certain death under the Taliban. We did not get all those people out. Nonprofit groups rallied after this. Many of these groups, founded and staffed by American veterans who had profound relationships of trust with these interpreters and other allies seeking asylum to try to get them out. And there's no way of knowing exactly how many remain, but it's definitely in the thousands.

>>Jeff Crane: And if you're going to cast war in moral terms, let me say this. This is absolutely shameful. What we did at the end of this Freedom's Sentinel and Resolute Support.

>>Sara Hart: Operation Enduring Sentinel continues. Uh, picked up on October 1st, 2021, where Operation Freedom's Sentinel had left off.

>>Jeff Crane: Abandoned their duty, right?

>>Sara Hart: Enduring Sentinel keeps going after the betrayal of the allies. Enduring Sentinel is dedicated to combating terrorist threats that emanate from Afghanistan, but doing so from remote locations.

>>Jeff Crane: So more drones? So basically. Hasta la vista. We're gone.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah. Well, we'll keep an eye on it, but, like, from, like, over here.

>>Jeff Crane: Welcome back to the SNAFUBAR listeners. We're nearing the end of our final episode in a three part series on Afghanistan, and we just talked about America's August 2021 withdrawal from that country after 20 years of occupation. This still ongoing Operation Enduring Sentinel, is what remains of American efforts at this point, and that operation monitors activities from afar. I'm Jeff Crane, and I'm here with Sarah Hart.

>>Sara Hart: So our story is not over. “Wake Me Up When September Ends” is the title of this episode. Our researchers and our producer like that one. And while the Green Day's song, whose title it lifts, is not about Afghanistan, it's not about the war on terror. It is of the era, and it is about grief. When I think about what lessons we might draw from Afghanistan that fits, there's a lot of grief. Grief wrapped up with all of it. The day after the last Americans left Afghanistan, President Biden said that the U.S. would learn this would be the end of an era of major military operations to remake other countries.

>>Jeff Crane: Oh, yeah. You know, I've run out of exclamations. There's no way to know how many U.S. military operations are underway right now as we’re recording this. And listeners, that number will almost certainly change before you hear this. The rapid pace of change with warfare is stunning right now.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah. Can we even imagine a major military effort that had nothing to do with remaking another nation? I don't know what that would look like for America. You know, so I'm not sure that we're, that we've learned that the military budget has steadily increased since the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. So the military's active, they're doing stuff.

>>Jeff Crane: And it's been going up the whole time. Right? Basavich, again here, quote, even excluding the costs of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. military spending grew by nearly 50% in the decade following 9/11, unquote. He's leaning on Brown University's Cost of War project for those numbers. That's an amazing project worth looking into if you're not familiar with it.

>>Sara Hart: The money is indicative. The money points to something we are equally concerned with the moral costs of war here, the human costs of war here. And so we point to the numbers. We point to the dollars. They're always changing. But there are lessons when we think about what we might learn. What we're thinking about is not strictly economic. So aside from the budget, what else might we learn? Can the 21st century tally of suffering be understood as what American political scientist Chalmers Johnson calls blowback?

>>Jeff Crane: We're going to tread carefully here.

>>Sara Hart: We're going to tread carefully.

>>Jeff Crane: So blowback is a term invented by the CIA and first used in its after action report on its 1953 secret overthrow of the democratically elected prime minister, Mosaddegh in Iran. Blowback refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. Johnson published the book “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire” in 2000, in which he set out to explain why we are hated around the world, unquote. He was big on the difference between militarism and domestic defense. He saw himself as a cold warrior. That's how I saw myself at one point in time. And then he understood that after the Cold War, we didn't demobilize. We expanded into what Basovich called the New American Militarism.

>>Sara Hart: Right. And the book, “Blowback,” Johnson's book. It was not exactly a bestseller.

>>Jeff Crane: Gotta compete with Stephen King, right?

>>Sara Hart: You gotta compete with Stephen King. Right? It was not until after September 2001, and then the book took off. And Johnson followed it up with “The Sorrows of Empire” in 2004 and “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic” in 2006.

>>Jeff Crane: Y’know, fun stuff.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, all the fun stuff. It's a trilogy. It's one that he didn't particularly want to write. And he talks about that. He opens nemesis with a lengthy quote from the Indian author, and human rights activist, Arundhati Roy, who was writing for The Guardian in late September 2001. Roy's article was published on September 29th, not long after the towers fell. It's scathing and it's harsh, and we will not read the whole thing here. Early in it, though, she says that Osama bin Laden is, quote, the American president's dark doppelganger. And then she sort of calls out a series of American actions in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and contextualizes those actions within and from the perspective of the civilians in those nations who are on the receiving end of American military actions. Now, Roy's historically and contextually minded critique didn't land with most of the nation. It did not change the path that America would take. And just to be clear, she had no love for the Taliban, no love for al-Qaeda. What she took issue with was the chest-thumping simplicity of America's one upsmanship and immediate, violent response. In an assertion that resonates with our efforts here in the SNAFUBAR,he called out President Bush for what she saw as Orwellian doublespeak, writing that quote when he announces the airstrikes, President George Bush said, we are a peaceful nation.

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, he exemplified it there. America has long called itself peaceful the exact moment it's launching war. We built up that myth of a peaceful nation forced into combat before we launch an all out assault, or while we're launching it. And the myth is part of the war effort. And the myth makes it hard to see history clearly. It makes us uninterested in that history. Let's roll out one more Basavich quote, just because Sarah loves him so much, but the guy is a great writer and he is spot on. This is also from the “New American Militarism.” And he says, quote, the new American militarism draws much of its sustaining force from myth-- stories created to paper over incongruities and contradictions that pervade the American way of life, unquote. We've seen some pretty severe incongruities over the last three episodes, and one of them is this really strong assertion of peacefulness, particularly at peak moments of militarism.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah. It's persistent, and so is the distance that we draw between ourselves and our enemies, between our wars and the historical context within which those wars developed. Just think about having a military budget that continues to swell after the close of a war, as ours does, and has. I suppose if we're able to draw a lesson from all this, or a direction that we might hope to take, it would be to diminish the effects of this distance. Let's close the gap between what we say we believe and how we behave between our wars and our public awareness of those wars and the people they affect. Between the present moment and all of the rich history that we have to draw from, and thinking about how to move forward in this world.

>>Jeff Crane: That's right, listeners. Our prescription is more history. As much as we can, we want to try to learn stories from our past because those stories can help us understand our present. And if I come to a conclusion from all this history that we've covered in these last three episodes in Afghanistan, I would have to say that as of today anyway, America has made essentially no changes to its militaristic patterns, way of thinking, no change to either its stance toward or approach to other nations. In fact, right now it has gotten much worse. Oh, and you know, something we didn't get talked about today is the effects of post 9/11 American militarism on domestic security and surveillance, and in other ways in which our society has been deeply coarsened by our responses to what happened on 9/11.

>>Sara Hart: Oh, Jeff, the Patriot Act! The Patriot Act, we didn't get to it! That is a show for another time. We will come back to that. We've promised a few here, listeners. Stop promising so many.

>>Jeff Crane: We’ve got to stop promising shows.

>>Sara Hart: Or at least we have to write them down. And we will. We will return to it as soon as we're able. That's a good one.But that's all for today. And that concludes for now, our three part series on Afghanistan. Thank you for joining us here in the SNAFUBAR. Thank you for listening.

>> Sara Hart: You've been listening to SNAFUBAR, a Cal Poly Humboldt production brought to you by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Our team includes me.

>> Jeff Crane: And me.

>> Abigail Smithson: Abigail Smithson, producer.

>> Liam Salcuni: Liam Salcuni, writer, researcher.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Roman Sotomayor, writer, researcher.

>> Abigail Smithson: You can find more information about SNAFUBAR on khsu.org.

Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.